This blog is about spiritual awakening, maps and stages, the blinding effects of our strong momentum/conditioning (karmic propensities), view, realization, experience, etc. If you're new here, I recommend going through the 'Must Reads' articles (see sidebar). For discussions you are welcome to join the Awakening to Reality Facebook group

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‘...First, the elimination of ignorance entails direct realization of
the three characteristics, meaning a highly developed degree of
awakening to the natural and basic truth of all sensate phenomena,
everything that is actually experienced. In this way of perceiving,
reality is no longer broken up at a core perceptual level into
perceiving subject and perceived object. Nor is anything taken to be
unchanging, static, or continuous at a very basic perceptual level.
Thus, nothing comprises, forms, or fabricates a deluded sense of an
autonomous self, a volitional self, a doer, controller, a “this”, an
agent, a separate, permanent, split off, centrally perceiving,
independently existing consciousness, subject, awareness, or watcher.
This becomes hardwired at the sensate level through clear perception and
investigation of the sense doors. At this point in practice, sensate
reality is no longer split up artificially into name and form (mentality
and materiality, thought and the other five sense doors), as each is
just part of the variety of qualities occurring in the fluxing volume of
experience.

This then has profound implications for the experience
of the six sense doors, as now there is, for lack of a better way to put
it, only one wide-open, volumetric sense door and it is sensing itself.
Thus, there is really no contact, as there is no sense of anything
split off that would be contacting some thing “out there”; there are
instead just the qualities and textures of transient space. As there are
just the qualities and textures of transient space, it can no longer be
said that the qualities and textures called vedana belong to anyone,
not that vedana isn’t still causal, since it is. At this point in
practice, gone is some sense in that undifferentiated field of a split
off “this side” that could try to move closer to pleasant sensations
(fundamental attraction), move farther away from unpleasant sensations
(fundamental aversion), or tune out boring sensations in a way that
creates a sense of perceptual duality (fundamental ignorance), this
being the basic implication of craving.

Thus, there is also no
solidification of anything, as the whole transient field directly and
immediately knows its own utter transience, and so the sort of clinging
to any sense of a permanent, continuous “self” referred to here is
rendered perceptually impossible. Without any possibility of habitual
solidification, the special type of becoming or existence referred to
here can’t happen, as it is directly known that no separate thing
transmigrates, nothing remains, nothing makes up some stable core of
perpetuating consciousness or self. That is all so far so good, as it
goes. In fact, if you do insight practices well enough, you too will
come to see that all that abstract-sounding theory suddenly describes
experience to a tee! How cool is that? In fact, it is very, very cool.

However, finally, in the last two links, we have a problem, that being
the annoying fine print regarding the end of suffering promised by the
Buddha. As clearly demonstrated in the suttas, and as should be obvious,
a body was born, and while the body lives, there will be pain, aging,
sickness, and finally death. Then, we have the endless debates between
the Mahayana and the Theravada about what happens next, but vastly more
important to the pragmatist is understanding the links from one end to
the other of this lifetime to the degree that they can be understood
while a body still lives.’